The 80s. Art of the Eighties

A major exhibition on the 1980s at Albertina Modern bears visible witness to an era that saw artists shatter established paradigms and set off in search of expressive diversity.

1980s art seeks to overwhelm: it was an era of visual excess, individual styles, and never-ending stories. All this went hand in hand with exuberant imagery, a strong narrative urge, and an enthusiasm for the exploration of materials and new media.

Artists such as David Salle and Julian Schnabel gave rise to the painting-as-fiction. And in the oeuvres of artists like Francesco Clemente and Mimmo Paladino, eclecticism prevails across numerous works independent of time and place. One finds quotations with origins ranging from antiquity to the present that serve to accentuate the non-authentic and invest the familiar with new meaning. The central exponents of this decade—Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Julian Schnabel—are present here alongside less-known figures well worth discovering, including Jack Goldstein, Isolde Joham, and Julia Wachtel. The quotation, the distrust of originals seen in the oeuvres of Richard Prince and Elaine Sturtevant, and the art of sampling as practiced by Gerwald Rockenschaub and David Salle show to just what extent the 1980s were indeed the most important decade of recent art history in terms of art’s subsequent path forward.

The loss of immediacy owed to a world growing more and more virtual and developing bit by bit into a media society is also reflected in an art of the simulacrum: the verisimilitude of pictures from the realms of high and low art is generally called into question, with artists such as Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman grappling with the phenomenon of the likeness per se and thereby inventing a second-degree reality.